Welcome to the Third World, Part 14: Homeowners Become Renters

This morning's housing report was huge. As one representative headline put
it: "Housing starts up sharply; permits highest since 2008."

Dig just a little deeper and it's still huge, though in a different way. Turns
out that all the increase was in apartment building, while single family homes
-- the linchpin of what used to be thought of as the American Dream -- actually
fell yet again. Here's a brief but on-point analysis from the New York Times:

The headlines in the new report on home building activity -- which is being
closely watched, after many other kinds of data point to a softening in housing
-- are pretty terrific.

The number of permits for new housing units soared 8 percent in April, the
Census Bureau said on Friday, to an annualized 1.08 million. And the number
of homes on which builders began construction rose a whopping 13 percent,
to an annualized 1.07 million. If nothing else, the numbers help assuage
fears that the housing industry is losing momentum. It now looks like the
rough winter was indeed a major factor holding back home building activity
so far this year, and there is now a spring thaw underway.

But even in the good new numbers, there is a clear trend evident: The entirety
of the improvement is coming from more building of housing in structures
with five or more units, most commonly rental apartment buildings.

The number of permits issued for single-family homes rose by a mere 2,000
annualized rate in April, where the number for units in these so-called multifamily
structures rose by 81,000. The same story applies for housing starts, where
the number of single-family homes rose a measly 5,000, versus 124,000 for
multifamily units.

In other words, if you think that this housing recovery involves any meaningful
increase in the number of traditional, suburban single-family homes with
a yard and picket fence, you have it wrong. The number of single-family homes
started is well below its level of late last year and still at February 2013
levels. Multifamily construction, meanwhile, has been soaring throughout
the last five years.

Parsing more detailed data available for the first quarter, Jed Kolko, chief
economist of real estate firm Trulia, notes on Twitter that 93 percent of
the multifamily construction was intended to be rentals, and 89 percent of
the units were in buildings with 20 or more units.

Some thoughts

There are two ways of looking at this:

1) It's a return to a more rational way of organizing a society in which people
who shouldn't buy houses don't. Rather than borrowing huge amounts of money
against modest incomes and inadequate assets, the typical American family will
henceforth rent an apartment or small house until they've saved a hefty down
payment, say 40%, and proved to themselves and a local bank that their income
stream is highly predictable. This kind of world is better for all involved
because it avoids the massive, family-disrupting upheavals that now occur with
every "housing recession."

2) It's yet another signpost on the middle class descent into what used to
be thought of as poverty, but is now the new normal. Owning a lot of stuff
-- house, new SUV, major toys like boats and sports cars -- is beyond the reach
of more and more families, and in place of this financial freedom-to-act-stupid
is something akin to serfdom: dependence on one or several crappy service industry
jobs that pay barely enough to cover rent and health insurance; college financed
with student loans rather than savings; an inability to save enough to prevent
a growing dependency on government and loan-sharky lenders.

In this scenario the US comes to resemble one of those old-style company towns
where workers work to survive while their needs are met by dominant, paternalistic
entities (government and hedge funds in this case) that charge exorbitant prices
and high rates of interest, guaranteeing that most families fall deeper into
debt over time.

Where a typical middle class American once had a realistic prospect of paying
off their mortgage and thus owning a big, valuable asset free and clear while
also saving other money to give themselves a reasonable retirement, both sides
of that equation -- home ownership and excess income that enables savings --
are a thing of the past for a growing number of people.

Unfortunately, explanation number two looks more likely, which means in the
absence of a surge of high-paying jobs, this Road
to Serfdom will be very busy in the years ahead.

John Rubino is author of Clean Money: Picking Winners
in the Green Tech Boom (Wiley, December 2008), co-author, with GoldMoney's
James Turk, of The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It (Doubleday,
January 2008), and author of How to Profit from the Coming Real Estate
Bust (Rodale, 2003). After earning a Finance MBA from New York University,
he spent the 1980s on Wall Street, as a currency trader, equity analyst and
junk bond analyst. During the 1990s he was a featured columnist with TheStreet.com and
a frequent contributor to Individual Investor, Online Investor,
and Consumers Digest, among many other publications. He now writes
for CFA Magazine and edits DollarCollapse.com and GreenStockInvesting.com.